A small Bulgarian town has settled in the German city of Offenbach: nearly 6,000 Bulgarian citizens live there, which is about 4% of the city's population. Bulgarians are in second place among foreigners receiving social benefits. The municipal and social services, the employment offices, the health and educational structures of the city, as well as the humanitarian organizations in German in good faith try to permanently help these people, but communication does not always work, and cultural and mental differences clearly often lead to a dead end.< /p>
At the invitation of the Labor Bureau MainArbeit and the CRIS project (with the support of the EU), within the framework of an information conversation dedicated to Bulgaria, we tried to transfer more bridges, even if they were only bridges, between the listed services and migrants from Bulgaria. According to the German participants, these nearly 6,000 people mostly speak Turkish and are probably of Roma origin.
They come completely unprepared for what awaits them
Why do these people come to Germany? – From the very beginning, this seemingly simple question arose. Is it because they strive for a better life, for higher incomes, for better education for their children – or are they fleeing social and ethnic segregation, if not racism, in their homeland? The answer probably contains a little bit of all of this, but these migrants generally arrive completely unprepared, they do not know German, they do not know the German codes of communication, norms and values, and quite often they are forced to live in terrible conditions as well, as the organizer of the seminar.
People from Offenbach, who work or volunteer to interact with migrants from Bulgaria, talk about numerous practical problems from everyday life: how difficult it is to judge whether the level of education received in Bulgaria meets the German criteria. In what impenetrability are the hierarchies and relationships within the large migrant families: who exactly makes the decisions, what is the role of the “patriarch“, why young girls listen to grandparents when making fateful decisions.
The problems with young women
In this connection, it is also about the projects in Offenbach, aimed mostly at young women. These are regular consultations attended by the whole family, and the hostesses from the municipal services explain the place of women in German society, what prospects and chances in life they have in this country. “Girls have the opportunity to go to school, get an education, learn a profession – for them, this is a better prospect than early pregnancy”, summarizes the organizer of the seminar.
One of her colleagues tells about a 13-year-old girl who has already given birth to her first baby – and about his attempts to establish contact, to understand the motivation of this teenage mother: “How do these young girls become literate in Bulgaria? What is their life concept? And what can we do to help them?“ – such questions are asked not only by this participant, but also by other women and men among the dozens of employees and volunteers who took part in the seminar.
Problems in communication and within families
In their work with migrant families from Bulgaria, they have established something else significant. Usually, says one of the participants in the seminar, the adults speak Turkish, the older children, who were born and possibly went to school in Bulgaria, communicate with each other in Bulgarian, and the youngest who end up in a kindergarten or school in Offenbach , they now speak mainly German – and a serious communication problem arises in families.
It also turns out that the migrants from the newer waves are often met with a knife by the older arrivals – probably due to jealousy of the received and expected social benefits. One of the participants vividly describes some household misunderstandings: the migrants from Bulgaria and Romania did not understand the concept of waste separation, and at the same time the level of noise in their everyday life was much higher than usual for Germany.
They don't want to study and work
Two of the participants in the informative talk speak with a critical misunderstanding about the attitude of many of the young men in these communities. Most young men say: “No, I don't want to study, I want to have a family”.
„They don't even want to work,”, says one. "That's right," adds the other participant. And he continues: “We ask these young men what they want to do, and most say they want to earn a lot of money. However, the majority of them have no education, some are even illiterate. When they are offered a job, they either don't go to the interview at all or say they don't like the job. They usually say, “I want to make a lot of money and retire at 40,” that is the message. I'm sorry - I tell them - but in Germany you must first work and pay pension contributions in order to retire eventually at 65.
In the framework of the informational event, we talk about a whole series of phenomena and problems related to Bulgarian migrants in Offenbach. It is that they are the product of a “culture of approximation”, as opposed to the German “culture of precision”. That by instinct they do not trust state institutions and communal services, but rely mainly on intra-family solidarity. That their attitude to contracts, discipline, order and organization differed from that of the Germans. Towards the end of the seminar, one of the participants recalls the well-known fact that these migrants usually settle on a “chain“ principle: one drags his feet to a German city, then gradually relatives and friends begin to arrive. But mainly men come first, families join later. Of course, it is also about the infamous schemes with the generous German child benefits that are “going” for Bulgaria.
There are also highly qualified
As a comment on the information that nearly 3 million Bulgarians have sought luck and a better life abroad, one of the participants asks: “Okay, but where do the better educated Bulgarians emigrate? Obviously not in Germany…“. Most likely, this interlocutor in the informational conversation was misled by his personal optics and personal experience. And it has to be explained to him that among these more than 400,000 Bulgarians who live in Germany, there are all kinds of people: both hygienists and workers in meat processing plants, as well as thousands of engineers, doctors, builders and movers, as well as famous theater people , musicians and writers.
And the idea of the organizers of the meeting in Offenbach, not least, is precisely this: to reduce the number of unqualified and low-paid people, those living on social benefits – and to increase the number of Bulgarians in the city who work and pay their contributions in order to one day wait for their dream retirement.
The author Alexander Andreev was a guest participant in the mentioned information talk about Bulgaria and prepared this publication with the consent of the organizers and participants.